git-brief

A CLI tool that writes your daily standup for you using your local Git history and GitHub activity.

$ git brief

📋 brief - Thursday, June 26

Yesterday:
  • Fixed auth token expiry bug in /api/refresh (PR #234 merged)
  • Reviewed 2 PRs: payment-service, user-onboarding
  • Pushed rate limiter skeleton to feature/rate-limit

Today:
  • Finishing Redis TTL fallback in rate limiter
  • Pick up caching ticket (#301)

Blockers:
  None

📋 Copied to clipboard. Paste into Slack.

How it works

1. It scans your local git commits (defaulting to yesterday, and automatically skipping weekends).
2. It fetches PRs you merged or reviewed via the GitHub API.
3. It bundles that data into a strict prompt and sends it to your LLM provider.
4. It outputs your standup to the terminal and copies it to your clipboard.

It makes exactly one API call per run. No chat interfaces, no wasted tokens.

Features that catch edge cases

Traditional git log tools usually miss half of what you actually do in a day. git-brief is built to catch the edge cases:

• Uncommitted work: It runs git status to include files you are actively modifying.
• Git stashes: It checks your recent stashes for work you had to pause.
• Pair programming: It parses Co-authored-by: tags in commit messages so you get credit when pairing.
• Rebase-aware: It strictly looks at the commit date (%cI), meaning rebased commits aren't lost if the author date is old.
• Draft PRs & Issues: It tracks open PRs and issues you've commented on, not just what was merged.

Installation

Using Go (Recommended)

go install github.com/tukesh1/git-brief@latest

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/tukesh1/git-brief.git
cd git-brief
make install

Note: The binary installs to ~/.local/bin/git-brief. Make sure that folder is in your $PATH.

Quick start

Run the setup wizard to configure your workspaces and API keys:

git brief init

Then generate your standup:

git brief

Advanced Usage

git brief                     # Generate today's standup
git brief init                # Run the setup wizard
git brief config              # Show your config (keys masked)
git brief version             # Print the installed version

# Useful Overrides
git brief --since "monday"    # Custom time range
git brief --days 3            # Look back 3 days
git brief -w ~/projects       # Scan a specific directory instead of config defaults
git brief --no-clipboard      # Print only, skip clipboard copy

Slack Integration

If you want git-brief to post directly to Slack instead of copying to your clipboard, you have two options:

1. Background Send (API Token)

Set a Slack user token (xoxp-...) and a channel in your config (git brief init). It will post the standup as you.

git brief            # Prompts you to confirm, then posts
git brief --slack    # Posts immediately without confirmation
git brief --no-slack # Skips Slack entirely

2. Open Hand-off (Browser)

If you don't want to use an API token, you can just set a channel link in your config.

git brief --slack-open

This copies the brief to your clipboard and automatically opens the Slack app to your specified channel so you can hit paste.

Supported AI providers

Because git-brief only sends commit metadata (and never your source code), context windows are extremely small and cheap.

Provider	Model	Cost per standup
Google Gemini	gemini-2.5-flash	Free tier available
Anthropic	claude-3.5-haiku	~$0.001
OpenAI	gpt-4o-mini	~$0.001

You bring your own API key. There is no subscription and no backend.

Development

make build     # Compile the binary
make install   # Compile and copy to ~/.local/bin
make lint      # Format and vet the code
make clean     # Remove build artifacts

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

MIT